Personal

by

Is It Okay If I Collapse Now?

Rarely in my life have I been as tired as I am tonight. It’s a bone deep kind of exhaustion brought on by an excess of work and worry. I’m presently getting exactly as much work as one person can possibly handle, but it’s too late to eliminate worries for June financial deadlines. I have a bill looming in exactly a week and I still have no idea how I’m going to tackle it. Monday is my deadline for transferring PayPal fees and their landing in my bank account in time for Friday, so hopefully a huge miracle will happen this weekend… I think I’ve done my share of hard work in the last two and a half months and have earned a miracle.

I’m therefore wondering how the heck I am managing to be so happily creative and productive these days.

I just landed a new transcription client whom I hope will help me solidify the base for my business. I’m putting a lot of energy into transcription, which I think I will do better with than translation, so I completely rewrote my professional website this week.

I’ve also renewed my interest, and hope, in affiliate marketing by trying out lens making at Squidoo. It’s fun, creative, and has introduced me to a whole new audience.

And somewhere in all of that, in stolen moments of time, I’ve somehow managed to learn how to read all 46 of the basic hiragana kana.

I transcribed from 4PM to midnight yesterday, barely slept a wink, transcribed from 8AM to 5PM today, and then went to deliver fliers for three hours. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go collapse now. 🙂

by

New Project Starting to Bear Fruit

When I finished my cross-stitch project at the end of April, I posted that I was in need of a new project. I decided to cross another item off my bucket list: learn to read a language that does not use the Roman alphabet. My top three choices were Russian, Arabic, and Japanese. I decided on Japanese because it’s a much easier language to learn than the other two. Moreover, I have some experience with Asian languages, having studied Mandarin in college. Japanese is much easier since it has two phonetic alphabets and no tones. I set myself a goal: to be able to read a sushi menu.

As it turns out, there are three sets of characters in Japanese, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The last one is what people think of when they think of Japanese writing; those are the pictograms that represent words. Hiragana and katakana are symbols that represent sounds and have no inherent meaning. They are just like our letters.

Common pedagogy suggests learning the forty-six hiragana characters first, so I got my hands on the most highly recommended Hiragana workbook, Let’s Learn Hiragana: First Book of Basic Japanese Writing (Kodansha’s Children’s Classics) and started studying.

Oy. Learning languages past mid-adolescence is quite difficult. Nothing was sticking. The first lesson has you learning ten hiragana characters and it was so overwhelming. I would write them over and over and over again, but all I saw was squiggles.

Until the other night. I couldn’t sleep and was browsing through the sushi app on my iPod Touch when I realised that the squiggles next to the English were hiragana. And I could recognize three of them, those for the sounds a, ka, and i. Breakthrough. The squiggles were no longer meaningless, they were sounds!

I’ve been able to add three more symbols, one of which isn’t in that first lesson: e, o, and ga. Ga was the forth symbol in that first word, which is akagai, a type of clam.

With those six, I have been able to truly READ some words. The first one was aoi. Blue.

I can now read a couple of words on a sushi menu, including ika, squid.

I’m going to start making myself vocabulary flashcards. It’s all well and good to be able to read, but understanding would be good, too. 🙂 The next sound I’m working on is U so that I can read all the vowels.

My favourite Japanese word that I can read is oka. That’s hill. And also French-Canadian for stinky delicious cheese. 😀

by

Parking Your RV At a Hospital

Tioga George had some day surgery today. Glad all went well, George!

When he was well enough to be released, he was wheeled out to his RV sitting at the back of the hospital parking lot. What luxury!

I had major surgery in July of 2007. I didn’t feel too badly upon awakening, but the drive home over terrible Gatineau roads, and the drive back to the hospital the next day for a dressing change, was torture. There would have been a lot less pain, and possibly a quicker convalescence, if I could have gone home to my RV parked in the hospital parking lot instead of being subjected to those two car rides. I remember my surgeon’s shocked expression at seeing me in a wheelchair the next day. I was worn out from trying not scream on the half hour ride to see her!

I don’t know if US hospital parking lot rates are as bad as those in Canada, but I think that any price would be worth getting permission to spend at least a couple of days in the lot in an RV after undergoing surgery to avoid the agonizing ride home.

by

Waiting For the eCheque to Clear

This morning, I awoke at an odd hour for me, 5:45, and was debating whether to get up or go back to sleep when my cell phone rang. No need to answer, I knew who it was. I’m just glad I was already awake! I was surprised that the client called me and even more surprised by the deluge of emails from her that trickled in during the day. The woman is a nut case, plain and simple. I also firmly believe that she does not intend to pay her contractors unless they play hardball with her.

Like any bully, she made me out to be the bad guy, calling me dramatic and unreasonable, claiming that she never got the invoice from me. Later, she said she had an invoice but that it was not from a name she recognized. She was peddling really, really hard, the way someone does when they know they’ve been caught red-handed.

I pointed out these facts to her:

1) the invoice was from the PayPal address I had given her numerous times, so there was no reason for her to not recognize it;
2) I had signed a number of documents showing both my legal name and my in-use name, so there was no reason not to recognize that the invoice was from me;
3) the invoice clearly described the audio files by their file names, so there was no question of what it was for.

I got nearly a half dozen requests today to confirm that I am who I said I am in the invoice. I finally had enough and replied in all caps! Yes, I raised my voice!

I also told her:

1) that I’ve been in business for 15 years and have never had to send such a large number of emails regarding payment (at least four). All I wanted was confirmation that I was going to be paid and when. All she had to do was reply to one and say “I process my invoices on such and such a day” and I would have waited for that day before raising a ruckus;

2) that she screwed herself since I produce quality work on short notice and on time.

A PayPal eCheque just landed in my inbox, so I won’t know till late next week if this matter is resolved or not.

I do not regret my behaviour in this matter. I am convinced that had I not taken the action I did that I would have had no chance of being paid. At least, the odds are now 50/50. If she does not pay me, then I can claim this invoice amount on my taxes as a business loss .